> However, the result of his hoax was to give a freakin' big stick to them as want to attack those ivory tower eggheads with things like, "a majority of published research is wrong, and given that academics inhabit a very rarefied and solipsistic reality rather different from most of us".
This is just my own opinion, but I think you are 100% wrong here and the reality is precisely the opposite what you're claiming. The weapons used against science by the current anti-intellectual climate are the same ones created by the postmodernist/poststructuralist crowd that Sokal was trying to expose as frauds. His only crime was being too little too late. Even some figures in that sphere admit that things like the Strong programme laid the foundations for the current bad-faith attacks on science. Here's Bruno Latour:
"[they] are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies?"
Claiming that Sokal was the problem, instead of the guy fighting the problem, is a pretty cruel twist on top of our current mess.
This is just my own opinion, but I think you are 100% wrong here and the reality is precisely the opposite what you're claiming. The weapons used against science by the current anti-intellectual climate are the same ones created by the postmodernist/poststructuralist crowd that Sokal was trying to expose as frauds. His only crime was being too little too late. Even some figures in that sphere admit that things like the Strong programme laid the foundations for the current bad-faith attacks on science. Here's Bruno Latour:
"[they] are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies?"
Claiming that Sokal was the problem, instead of the guy fighting the problem, is a pretty cruel twist on top of our current mess.